Hello folks, hope someone can help me with an enigma.

What’s this all about?

I have scales which tell me how much I weigh and my percentage body fat. I tell it how tall I am and that I am female. My (much larger than me) fiance comes along to get weighed and we tell the scales that he is a man, 6’ 5” and rather bizarrely in my opinion, he’s running at like, 19% body fat. HE’S FATTER THAN ME!!!! His waist is 48” and weighs a whopping 280lbs.

I am 5’ 11”, 182lbs and my body fat is 40%. Because I am female.

I don’t get it and I don’t like it.

Please tell me I need new scales.

Also, how do I figure out the best body fat for me? Does anyone know?

Thanks for all your help.

Get a new scale or check that it was programed right.

from the first sight I got your BMI as 25.4 -his 33.2

http://www.nhlbisupport.com/bmi/

http://www.nhlbi.nih.gov/guidelines/obesity/bmi_tbl.htm

Also google it-I got lots of other sights but they also require measurments.

Hello MB
Thanks for the reply.
But I was asking a question regarding body fat percentage and not BMI. I understand the BMI thing although I don’t really respect that way of checking if you are overweight or not.
There are some UK rubgy players who come up as obese in the BMI rating, but are first class, professional athletes!!
Thanks again

Amanda, I don’t necessarily have an answer to your question about body fat (I’m hoping someone else does!), but I just wanted to address the “athletes ranked as obese according to BMI issue.”

Yes, it’s true that people who have a lot of muscle may rank quite high on the BMI charts, because muscle is very dense.  On the other hand, I believe that if you have a very high (ie: “obese") BMI, there’s a simple way to determine whether you fall into the “extremely muscled” or “extremely fat” categories: look in a mirror!  If you look in the mirror and you’re chiselled like a body builder, you probably have nothing to worry about.  If you look in the mirror and see body parts that keep moving after you stop, you’re probably in the “too much fat” category.

It’s not a foolproof method, of course.  Body fat percentage is probably a much better choice, assuming you get the scale to work correctly!  Good luck!

Cheers,
Julie

Amanda, first you have to be diligent about with those scales is that it is set for your height,sex, weight and age, second it is a percentage measured by percentage calculated by bioelectrical impeadence analysis and can be thrown off by a number of things-they are not accurate! There are a couple of medical tests you can go for like hydrostatic weighing or a DEXA test.

Thanks Julie & Shawn for your responses.

I guess these machines are built for “average” people and can’t cope with people who exercise, weigh a bit more but carry more muscle.

I will do the next best thing and look in the mirror as suggested by Julie.

Thanks again

It sounds like to me that your scale does not make an adjustment for athletes, the bioelectical impedence method (which is what your body fat scale uses) is based on statistical parameters which can vary if all the variables are not accounted for.  The scale that I use has an adjustment for the amount of exercise you are doing on a rating of 1-5 where 5 is highly athletic and 1 is completely sedentary.  Even then this method has a standard error of like 12% so it could be over or below your actual body fat by that much!

Taking into account most body fat measuring scales I would use as a means of tracking change rather than a highly accurate means of measuring actual body composition.

You also have to keep in mind that other factors can vastly skew the results on these scales such as dehydration, having just eaten, just exercised, different time of day, etc.

I would recommend searching out a location that does hydrostatic testing (sometimes called a dunk test) if you are really curious in finding what your body fat is.

Aimee